Rishi Sunak’s reshuffle has brought the resignation of five notably experienced junior ministers with well over three decades of frontbench time between them, while another departure left the government looking for its 16th housing minister since 2010.
Those who stepped down were Nick Gibb, the veteran schools minister; Jesse Norman, who was at the Department for Transport; Jeremy Quin, the paymaster general; Will Quince, a junior health minister; and George Freeman, the science minister.
The departures free up frontbench posts for Sunak loyalists and newer MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intakes, but some Tory MPs are likely to be nervous at the loss of such institutional knowledge – plus the sense that some of the departing ministers felt the need to focus on keeping their seats ahead of the election.
Another junior minister who was pushed out, Rachel Maclean, said she was disappointed to be asked to resign as housing minister, particularly as she had been expecting to bring the renters reform bill to the committee stage in the Commons on Tuesday.
The department in which the role sits, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, has the remit in its name, but the job is a notoriously fast-changing one, with 15 occupants since the Conservatives took power and seven since the 2019 election.
Maclean lasted just nine months in the job, and four people had filled it in the previous nine months. Her replacement is Lee Rowley, formerly local government minister.
The most experienced minister to leave is Gibb, who will stand down as an MP at the next election after 26 years in the Commons. Among a series of frontbench jobs over 17 years in government he has had several stints as schools minister, lasting more than a decade in all.
Gibb kept returning to the job because successive prime ministers thought he was good at it, but the National Education Union said he was an avowed centraliser who “sought to micromanage the teacher education curriculum”. In contrast, one Tory MP, Danny Kruger, tweeted simply: “All hail Nick Gibb”.
Norman had a series of roles in the Treasury, Home Office and Ministry of Defence and was twice a transport minister. The Hereford and South Herefordshire MP said he was “looking forward to more freedom to campaign on the River Wye and other crucial local and national issues”.
Quin and Quince are relative newcomers to parliament, elected in 2015. Quin, whose job was based in the Cabinet Office, said he wanted to focus on his Horsham constituency, where despite a 21,000 majority in 2019 he faces a potential challenge from the Liberal Democrats.
Quince, whose majority over Labour in his Colchester seat is below 10,000, said he wanted more time to focus on the training he is undertaking as a specialist reserve officer in the army.
Freeman, who has held a series of science-based ministerial roles, said that after working under four prime ministers he had decided over the summer to step back.
